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CONTESTED WELFARE STATES

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Tables and Figures.........................................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments............................................................................................................................................xvContributors...............................................................................................................................................xviiCHAPTER ONE Welfare States and Welfare Attitudes Stefan Svallfors........................................................................................1CHAPTER TWO Welfare Performance and Welfare Support Wim van Oorschot and Bart Meuleman...................................................................25CHAPTER THREE Attitudes Among High-Risk Groups Helena Blomberg, Johanna Kallio, Olli Kangas, Christian Kroll, and Mikko Niemelä.....................58CHAPTER FOUR A Normative Approach to Welfare Attitudes Christian Staerklé, Tiina Likki, and Régis Scheidegger..................................81CHAPTER FIVE Unraveling Working-Class Welfare Chauvinism Jan Mewes and Steffen Mau.......................................................................119CHAPTER SIX Age, Class, and Attitudes Toward Government Responsibilities Stefan Svallfors, Joakim Kulin, and Annette Schnabel............................158CHAPTER SEVEN Framing Theory, Welfare Attitudes, and the United States Case Clem Brooks..................................................................193CHAPTER EIGHT Welfare Attitudes in Context Stefan Svallfors..............................................................................................222Index......................................................................................................................................................241

Chapter One

Stefan Svallfors

The welfare state may in many ways be seen as a particular trademark of the European social model. An extensive set of social and institutional actors provide protection against negative consequences of common life-course risks—for example, by offering economic support in periods of hardship or by ensuring access to care and services. Based on collective responsibility and financing, welfare policies define a set of social rights, meet common vulnerabilities, and address needs for protection from market uncertainties.

However, over recent decades, European welfare states have undergone profound restructuring and recalibration. This is a result of economic and political pressures and of adaptive processes to new contingencies due to demographic changes, international migration and economic competition, and persistent unemployment. New forms of risk, taking different shapes across welfare states, have grown out of precarious and insecure life courses. Rising concerns about welfare state sustainability and the slowly growing "Europeanization" of welfare policies are also common challenges across the continent. Increased provider pluralism and new forms of public management, as well as new forms of policies and state intervention, in particular regarding activation policies, work-family reconciliation, and gender policies, are attempts to adjust to these challenges.

In parallel with institutional and structural developments, collective beliefs and representations about welfare and justice have also evolved, sometimes reflecting exclusion and perceived lack of deservingness of groups of beneficiaries—in particular, members of minority groups. In all of these challenges and processes of change, the attitudes and orientations of the public are important, although often neglected, factors that must be taken into account. Established viewpoints, normative expectations, concepts of justice, and similar perceptions are often very hard to change, and in this way, attitudes often function as a counterweight to abrupt policy changes. Policy reformers need to deal with normative orientations and expectations that have been established by previous politics and policies, and this often hinders or derails policy changes. Conversely, existing attitudes may be a resource and part of the opportunity structure for actors bent on challenging the institutionalized status quo and effectuating political change.

Attitudes toward the welfare state and other public institutions should be seen as central components of social order, governance, and legitimacy of modern societies. They tell us something about whether or not existing social arrangements are legitimate. Are they accepted only because people see no alternatives or think that action is futile, or are they normatively grounded? Are institutions considered to be fundamentally just or not? And research into the antecedents and consequences of these attitudes also asks us to judge public policies not only by their distributive effects or by their economic efficiency but by their normative effects on mass publics.

In this book, we analyze and report results from a comprehensive research program on citizens' attitudes toward welfare policies across European countries. We also offer a novel comparison with the case of the United States, putting into further perspective the potential regional distinctiveness of the European context as a whole. We are mainly occupied with normative orientations toward the (re)distribution of resources and life chances and toward public policies aimed at ameliorating adverse conditions. We summarize these under the heading "welfare attitudes." Our research focuses on the interplay among individual welfare attitudes and behaviors, institutional contexts, and structural variables. We hope to provide essential input to the interdisciplinary field of comparative studies of welfare state attitudes and to offer critical insights into the public legitimacy of welfare state reform.

Along with the societal and political context, the dominant welfare state theories also have changed considerably over time. The 1970s and 1980s saw a plethora of treatises on "welfare state crisis" (O'Connor, 1974; Offe, 1984), "legitimation crisis" (Habermas, 1975), and "government overload" (Crozier et al., 1975). All of these arguments suggested that a highly problematic relationship existed between the workings of government and the legitimacy of the state. Either citizens asked for too much government, in a vicious spiral of insatiable demands, or for less government, as expressed in increasing alienation from government and its bureaucratic intrusions into everyday life. As discussed in the next section, many of these arguments seem—with the benefit of hindsight—widely overblown.

Following the publication of the landmark study "Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and other publications from the "power resource" school of welfare state research (for example, Korpi, 1989; Huber and Stephens, 2001a; Korpi and Palme, 2003), the 1990s and early 2000s were much dominated by the debate on welfare regimes. What were the antecedents and effects of different institutional configurations of the welfare state (Korpi and Palme, 1998)? Did welfare states in fact come in "worlds" or "families of nations" (Castles and Mitchell, 1992; Castles, 1993; Scruggs and Allan, 2006; 2008)?

Here a much more harmonious...